Why I am a monarchist

It’s rather interesting to me, actually – the Jiang-Bell New York Times article, as well as several of the related discussions on the matter, have gotten me thinking about exactly why I have such a fond attachment to monarchical systems of government, and doctrines like the Mandate of Heaven and the Divine Right of Kings. I was rather intrigued to find that many of the reasons I have for being a monarchist are the same reasons my father has for being an American liberal (that is to say, economically interventionist and socially liberal). I don’t intend to put forward an entire apologia here, but rather just to lay out some of my own personal reasons for believing the way I do.

Firstly, as ironic as it may sound, I am a monarchist because I believe in the rightness of economic and legal equality (though I do not think either can be perfectly achieved). Every economic system has to have a set of rules which govern interactions and the distribution of what most people call ‘goods and services’, but which is really only physical energy. Not only ecosystems and geological tectonic systems, but also social structures which build themselves from the distribution of energy all align themselves along gradients; you will always have people who are higher up on the gradient and who are lower. The job of legal egalitarians is to ensure that the same set of rules applies to everyone on the gradient; the job of economic egalitarians is to ensure that the gradient is as ‘shallow-sloped’ as possible. Under a traditional system wherein one has kings and nobles and gentry and commoners, the institutional rulebook is all out in the open; even though there is ample opportunity to subvert it (as the British are particularly fond of doing), every person is knowledgeable of the rules they are playing by. You do not have the poor labouring under the falsehood of being (to paraphrase John Steinbeck) temporarily-embarrassed millionaires, nor do you have the millionaires (and heirs and heiresses of millionaires) pretending obscenely to be the hardworking salt of the earth, having pulled themselves up by their bootstraps with nothing more than the work of their own two hands.

As a result, it is much harder to be a legal egalitarian in an American-style republic than in a monarchy. We have a society where the wealthy are playing by an entirely different rulebook than the rest of us are, even though we have to piously pretend in public (and in dealing with other countries) as though everyone under the American legal system is already equal. If these gross perversities of the American culture are translated to a more traditional, ceremonious society where such roles are already out-in-the-open, the effects would be laughable, and would fool no one for even an instant. The end effect is that one can more accurately understand and describe the effects of luck and of hard work in determining social standing – and there is better basis for arguing for better and more humane treatment of poor people. Take Canada, for example: a nation founded on the basis of the monarchist political convictions of the United Empire Loyalists, which adopted for itself the ideology of ‘peace, order and good government’, which (as a result) does far better than we do on issues of legal, social and economic egalitarianism.

Second, the monarchy is a visible, living touchstone for civic engagement. My country does have a civic religion, but ironically it is a civic religion which celebrates detachment. The ideological commitments of the founders of the American republic make it much easier to articulate the ‘lone cowboy’ as the ideal American: someone who plays by his own rules and pursues his own self-interests (as crassly defined as possible), and screw everyone else who gets in his way. What makes this possible is the lack of any reference to common commitments outside of the rights due to each person under the law; the legal system, ultimately, is the only sacred scripture of the American civil religion – note the reverence with which both modern American liberals and modern American conservatives refer to the Constitution.

By contrast, one of the central elements of a civil religion where monarchy occupies a central place is the notion that there are common commitments. One is not just a constellation of negative rights and immunities; one is a subject (in both the philosophical and the political sense of the word), and a member of a community transcending the legal system. The position of a royal family within a society provides a ready reference to the kinship demands between one member of the society and another. This is not to say solidarity is impossible within a republican system (see Finland or Switzerland or Germany), or that it is automatic for a monarchy (take your pick of the Gulf states for examples of completely dysfunctional monarchies) – but the onus is upon republicans to create a mythology which encourages solidarity rather than detachment. The inequality and state of civic education within our own social experiment should serve as a useful cautionary tale to republicans about the need for such a mythology.

The third point is the notion of popular sovereignty. I addressed this briefly before in my previous post on the Jiang-Bell NYT piece; suffice it to say that the Iraq War, a murderous folly supported (at one point) by nearly three-quarters of the American public, utterly shattered my belief in the innate desirability of popular sovereignty. How popular an idea is, is no true measure of how good it is. Democratically-elected governments are capable of doing utterly heinous things: the Lord Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell, the plebiscitary dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte, the election and re-election of Andrew Jackson. The more so since they can point to the popularity of their heinous acts for justification. Monarchies may appear to be far less constrained in how far they are able to abuse their power, but tradition can make for a powerful check on would-be tyrants: none of the modern European states which have retained their monarchs have had much trouble with the monarchs abusing power (though their elected heads of government often do) in the past two hundred years or so.

But, just as with civic religion, it is not just having a tradition; rather the content of the tradition is what matters. In a state where apostolic Christian (or Muslim, or Confucian) authorities are constantly reminding the monarch that her power is temporary and contingent on her favour with God or with Heaven (and thus on their treatment of the poorest in society), that monarch is less wont to abuse her power within the state. A monarchy (or, for that matter, a republic) which does not have its share of Menciuses and Saint Sir Thomas Mores and other such dangerous radicals and prophets is all the more apt to become a tyranny. The doctrine of popular sovereignty has no such check. Whatever evil the elected leader does, is justified on the basis that the masses have demanded the leader, and thus whatever actions he takes. The opinion poll is the oracle of our times – but it is an oracle which demands no self-reflection.

Monarchy is not an easy thing to argue for in my own day and age, particularly from a left-leaning vantage point like my own. It comes loaded down with a lot of historical baggage, but ultimately I think it tends to be both realistic and moral – particularly the way it is practised in Western and Northern Europe and Japan.